[burningion]

I think of "social" media as a fundamentally isolating experience.

On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed.

As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural context.

According to Wilbur Schramm's theories of communication, human to human messages must occur over a shared cultural context, and social media shrinks that shared cultural context.

LLMs as a platform could shrink this shared cultural context even more, unless we become more deliberate about fighting back against this "shared experience" shrinking:

https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-f...

[baxtr]

Not refuting your point, just want to point out that I can think of many other isolating experiences like:

- reading a newspaper/books

- binge watching Netflix

- refreshing HN every 2 minutes

I’m not sure that’s a specific aspect of social media.

[jchw]

The interesting thing about reading a newspaper or book, though, is that it is the same for everyone. So you can feel a sort of connection to others who are or have also done this. I think this is also a good explanation for why it's so easy for people to bond over things like sports.

Same for Hacker News and older bulletin board style forums: it's largely the same experience for everyone (at least at any given moment). When you load the frontpage, it's roughly the same stories at the top for everyone (sans whatever you've manually hidden, of course.)

Social media isn't completely different, but it sure is weirder, especially with algorithmic feeds. I don't use social media anymore, but sometimes when I would talk with friends it would become apparent that the posts that were surfacing for them were completely different than the ones surfacing for me, which gave us very different ideas of what the general feeling on some issues was. I think this probably amplifies the living shit out of false pluralities.

[nine_k]

The idea is that your newsfeed eventually becomes uniquely tailored to you.

Of course it contains posts that may be shared widely and thus unifying, or posts from your close friends and relatives and thus also unifying in a way. This is not a given though, and the context of your newsfeed is effectively unique.

This is one of the reasons community feeds exist, which are the same for the members of a community and thus somehow unifying, around a topic of interest.

[Syonyk]

I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside the author's brain." Some books are better at this than others, certainly.

But even without that, look at the popularity of book discussions, book clubs, and things like that. Multiple people, reading the same book, at the same pace, and discussing it. That's the opposite of isolating, and is impossible to achieve with "personalized feeds." There's no common point to discuss.

And, as yet another example, have you ever read a book that someone else has marked up and taken notes in? Passing a book around a few friends, each with a different color pen to make notes, is certainly not isolating.

[Nevermark]

> I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside the author's brain."

I think that's it.

You are not connecting with "people", but you are connecting deeply with the highly concentrated (and presumably original and high quality) thoughts of one person.

Quality beats quantity for most types of relationships. We don't need lots of close friends, although that's great. But we really benefit from even one, two or three very close friends.

Social media increasingly isolating, full of dreck, and often shallow. But the last one, shallow, is not the problem the other two are. It is also healthy to maintain wider looser social circles.

[ljm]

I think there’s something quite cosy or comforting about simply enjoying the company of a friend with a book as well. Don’t even have to read the same thing, it’s just another way of spending time together and is anything but lonely or isolating.

Maybe it’s just one of those things that becomes more pleasant as you grow older and enjoy a more laid back pace, but I appreciate having those friends you can just chill with without really having to ‘do’ something or needing to fill the space with conversation. You’ve become close enough (not necessarily romantically) that you can just enjoy the presence.

[burningion]

Yeah, agreed. The essay I linked to adds the cost of choice for a medium against a potential reward too.

[melvinmelih]

> On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed.

I notice this with streaming platforms like Netflix as well, there is no longer a channel that we all watch (not even in the same household), so a lot of water boiler talk about TV shows have disappeared. The only conversations I have about TV shows are now on reddit.

[boxedemp]

Adding to this thought, I've found the move from scheduled content to on demand does this too. Often viewers are at different spots in the series which diminishes conversation.

[gessha]

For a long time I've read/watched media that none of my peers do - manga/anime/light novels and what I've works for me is to invite people to talk about what currently excites them no matter what media type it is and go into detail.

[lordnacho]

It's actually fascinating to think how many things I watched just because other people watched them. Now I hardly watch anything, even though I never thought my motivation for watching things was to talk about them.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's a bummer that there's a whole generation that doesn't know how much fun it was for everyone to watch and discuss the same episode of the same show at the same time week to week.

And yeah, now imagine everyone watching their own personalized media. Under the surface it's so empty.

[pesus]

Are there even any more shared cultural moments/experiences like that anymore? The closest thing I can think of is maybe large sporting events, but even then, they seem much less impactful than before.

[wpm]

There are still streaming shows that drip feed new episodes (S2E3 of Severance releases tomorrow for example) but it’s still somewhat diluted because there is so much content, it’s likely you don’t run into too many people who watch the same stuff as you. I can’t imagine a single show whose finale would have Times Square staring up at the screen like Seinfeld did.

[airstrike]

Sports are also totally about betting in the 21st century, at least in the US

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Who is into that?

[Syonyk]

Based on the amount of sports betting apps I see if there's a game on at a restaurant or something, a lot of people.

And in actual numbers, about 20% of Americans at least have an account with a sports betting platform.

https://www.sbu.edu/news/news-items/2024/02/05/st.-bonaventu...

[skydhash]

I’d say movies.

[CMay]

This is something I've been watching and thinking about for many years as tangential to a primary interest. It's not all bad as there have been many benefits to these changes too. These aren't occurring in isolation, since many other changes with similar effects pile on top of eachother to amplify the issues.

There are the usual culprits that people talk about and others which people don't seem to think about much. Looking forward to reading the book mentioned in the article to see someone else's in depth thoughts.

[skydhash]

I currently think status feed (WhatsApp, RSS) and discussions group (Messaging Apps, IRC, forums, Email threads) is the best way to connect socially on the web. Any algorithms that includes personalization is inherently selfish.

One great thing that I like to find is interest or curation lists. Like themed books, favorite music albums, software one uses,… Better than any recommendation engine.

[saurik]

I mean, this does still happen: there are many extremely major TV shows from the likes of Disney and Apple that are being released to streaming on a weekly schedule, and the world does in fact talk about them -- even on social media -- in lock step.

[baxtr]

Yeah, but actually people do talk about the same topics like Elon, Trump, etc. It’s just not the same view anymore, but the same issues.

[TuringNYC]

> On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed. > As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural context.

I see this as a feature. I was so bored in high school, kids talking about football games ad nauseam. There was no easy cohort to chat about things I cared more about. Why should we force one shared experience on everyone? After all, that is why i'm on HN and not CNN.

[saurik]

But like, the front page you and I each see on Hacker News is the same, the comments we see are the same, and everything is in the same order; if we talk to each other about trends in posts on Hacker News, we have some basis of shared reality.

Is this everyone? No. But "forcing one shared experience on everyone" is a straw man that wasn't being argued: the argument is about the other extreme, where every user has their own feed, and worlds splinter so hard that they are inherently irreconcilable with anyone else's.

[TuringNYC]

I appreciate your viewpoint here, and the sibling comment also. However, how does one practically not get an extreme version where everyone has their own feed. Speaking very personally -- here are my interests:

photography, brooklyn, coffee, health-tech, health-ai, fin-tech, finance, quant, bears, cats, calico cats, ucberkeley stats alums, genai in marketing, generative-ai created music, east coast gangster rap

There is no one community for all these. There are not even individual communities for each of these, some are too specific.

Yes, there are random slack instances (e.g., for ucberkely dept alumni) and random boards (quants and poets for finance) but social media provides a giant funnel for everything and hashtags let me focus on long-tail items of interest. I've carefully curated my account follows and hashtag follows over years.

[saurik]

First off, when you manually curate your world, you know what you chose to curate it for and you have to be are well aware of the world outside of it: it doesn't all automatically just happen in a way that can trick you into believing the entire world might be into your niche interests.

But also, looking at this as a kind of fractal level of curation, even within your east coast gangster rap community, there are still going to be a variety of people who think a number of different things about the world at large; and, unless you have an algorithmic feed inside of that community, you will see those varied models of the world blossom.

What happens when you fully go down the algorithmic feed rabbit hole is that, if someone in east coast gangster rap disagrees with you on some other unrelated axis--or they are simply boring to you--they will get increasingly filtered away by the algorithm, leaving you alone in your misleadingly-cacophonous bubble.

[_yb2s]

There’s an optimal middle ground and physical real world communities built around a shared interest generally fit this well- you still get a diversity of people, but they all want to be together for a reason.

[bmitc]

It's the Internet itself.

[whilenot-dev]

I'd rather say it's the targeted ads part of the internet.